If You Only Learn One Cake Recipe, Let it Be This One

If the grocery store isn't your favorite place, it should be. We're sleuthing for the best back-of-the-box recipes and every Sunday, Posie Harwood from 600 Acres will share our latest find.

Today: Can you count to 4? Great! You know a fantastic cake recipe.

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My mother makes the best birthday cakes. Every time I'm served a slice anywhere but home, I taste it hopefully, wishing it will be as good. But it never is. This is surprising to me, since my mom follows a modest, old-fashioned 1-2-3-4 cake recipe. My suspicion is that everyone is trying to whip up fancy, hedonistic birthday cakes when simple would suffice. Stick with the classics, people!

The 1-2-3-4 cake gets its name from the ingredient list: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 4 eggs. You'll find it printed on the side of the Swans Down cake flour box.

This basic formula yields a quintessential yellow layer cake. It has a tender crumb but is neither overly moist nor dense. Lighter than a chiffon or sponge cake, it tastes faintly of sugar and vanilla, which means you can pair it with absolutely any flavor, from chocolate and caramel to lime or raspberry. It's sturdy enough to be split into four layers and shellacked with peanut butter buttercream and fondant, yet humble enough to be served plain with whipped cream.

Two Harwood girls celebrating birthdays with 1-2-3-4 cakes

A novice baker would do well to master this recipe. It's one of the more forgiving layer cakes, and it will last you through a lifetime of birthdays and graduations and bake sales.

I frosted the cake with a Swiss meringue buttercream on the inside and a raspberry-flavored Swiss meringue buttercream on the outside. If you don't love pink quite as much as I do, you can leave the raspberry out.

A word on frosting: If intricate frosting techniques aren't your thing, just use an offset spatula to make little smudges around the cake like I did. Top the cake with fresh flowers (remove before serving!), whole berries, or shavings of chocolate.

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12 Comments

Making this cake for my brothers wedding on Saturday. Just double checking the crumb coat is the raspberry frosting not the butter cream or do you do crumb coat with the buttercream and then the add the raspberry frosting over it

Use the raspberry frosting for the crumb coat! Or you can also use regular buttercream for it, but I'd do the raspberry. Since it is a wedding cake, I would definitely recommend making more frosting than you need (double the batch) to ensure that you have enough to make it perfect looking! Good luck!

That cake pedestal in that picture is from Bed Bath and Beyond? I have never seen anything like that there...I am having a hard time finding something both large and tall. This one is just beautiful...as is the cake!

I made this cake for my sister's birthday yesterday and the frosting turned out way too buttery. When we sliced it, the frosting separated from the cake. Wayyyy too much butter. I followed every step exactly. Much prefer a buttercream frosting made with heavy cream, confectioners sugar.... Thanks anyway.

Ah. We made this cake once and had neighbors over to eat it (Yeah, make a big cake too big to eat at a go, and ask people over so you won't eat cake and icing until it is gone.) They could not believe it was a homemade, fairly ordinary cake. Granted they were college students, but still . . . .

Yes, this was a favorite when I was growing up. I'm quite certain this recipe was on the Swan's Down boxes even then (a long time ago). It's the first cake I remember, in fact, in a lifetime of so many cakes. I am fairly sure that the "one bowl golden layer cake" from "The Joy of Cooking" was the first cake I ever baked (age 8 or 9) and that the 1-2-3-4 cake was the second. Truly a classic. ;o)